But pumped storage likely only makes sense where you have some scale or in rural areas where people have ponds, etc.

If a Tesla Powerwall like thing gets cheaper over the next decade, then when it's time to replace my whole-house NG generator, I'll seriously consider the Powerwall system -- INCLUDING its cost and its capacity. (Since the main scenario I'm concerned about is long outages caused by things like ice storms, so I may need to run sump pumps a lot for days, or there was little point in getting the generator, at least for my situation.)

I can imagine this kind of thing being the case for MANY small businesses and homeowners, for whom setting up and maintaining pumped storage just isn't economically practical.

I agree that battery storage is going to increase going forward. The OP had expressed concern that our ultimate grid storage potential was limited because of the resource availability to build batteries. My post was meant to demonstrate that we are using other methods of storage besides batteries, especially on the large scale the OP mentioned. Not to disparage batteries as a storage option.

I've been pretty hard on wind power due to my personal experiences with it. We have an AeroGen6 generator, an older model but well respected. I think they were more European. We got our with our boat and had no manuals.

This spring while in the Bahamas we had several days of consistent heavy wind and I was able to figure out there was something wrong with the way the units controller/regulator was wired. When I fixed that the unit performed much better and has been producing the bulk of our energy since. Still tonight I had to run the generator.

Last summer I had to take the generator down and I left it on the deck for a few months. Somehow the alternator compartment managed to fill up with rain water. I drained it, sun dried it, soaked it with WD40 and reinstalled. It seems none the worse for the ware.

The difference from using it in Delaware And the Bahamas is that here it was much more exposed to open ocean winds and that the winds have been blowing hard for months on end. Back in Florida, in a bay, its contribution has immediately and significantly dropped. Even when I had this unit in Newfoundland we didn't have sufficiently SUSTAINED high winds to allow the troubleshooting I was finally able to do here.

So I'm now going to reverse my earlier opinion and say that we're it to fail I would replace it, especially if I could replace it in kind.

I see a lot of other boats with newer design units and typically they are feathered, not in use. I think most folks find them too noisey. They put out an annoying whine. Ours is very quiet by comparison, and much simpler. And apparently quite rugged.

Newfie - I don't know anything about small personal wind power but I suspect they are not close to the efficiency of commercial scale. In fact I haven't seen even small commercial wind done in Texas: all have been very big installations.

Newfie - Now that you got me thinking about it there's more personal scale options now then ever before. Remember the old war movies where the unit had a hand cranked radio? Not a lot of juice but now we have more efficient devices. Years ago my daughter gave me a hand cranked am/fm transistor radio in case of a hurricane power outage. Even had a built in flashlight. We have a variety of low am draw devices that would work: cell phones, LED lights, etc. And if your in good shape you could use a stationary bike w/generator for more power.

I actually bought a couple of Chineese military surplus units, came with a canvas bag and a frame you sat on, but still spun by hand. Some weird voltage for a field radio. Gave them away. I'm too old to be in that good a shape. LOL

A wind powered oil recovery project, led by DNV GL, has completed its first phase and is currently moving into its second phase, which includes refining and testing electrical systems, and investigating possibilities for broader applications.

The first phase of the The WIN WIN (WINd powered Water INjection) project determined the concept is technically feasible, capable of meeting performance targets, and cost-competitive with conventional water injection solutions, according to DNV GL. The second phase will focus on extensive physical lab testing of the electrical systems at the DNV GL power laboratories in Arnhem, the Netherlands.

The WIN WIN concept includes a floating wind turbine, which supplies power to a typical water injection process that includes pumping and basic water treatment. “The second phase of WIN WIN is expected to run over the course of one to two years and will result in an application guideline document for the industry. If all tests are successful, a realistic timeline for a first full scale prototype could be around 2020,” he added.

The project’s partners comprise DNV GL, ExxonMobil and ENI Norge – all part of the first phase – and the Norwegian Research Council – a new participant for the second phase.

"Isn't it proof that EROEI counts, even to bean counters and their precious bottom line?" Actually, no. I've never met an oil patch bean counter who knew what that acronym stood for. But they do understand $'s.

And just MHO since they don't give any cost numbers but I suspect this is more publicity driven the profit driven. I know what such ops cost and they aren't that big even offshore. Offshore when a wind turbine installation is so much more expensive then onshore.

But the bean counters do understand the underlying concept, that it is a waste burning precious petroleum to produce precious petroleum. That it loses money. Without all the fancy theory and such, they get it. So do you RM, in spite of your theoretical horseheadness

A wind powered oil recovery project, led by DNV GL, has completed its first phase and is currently moving into its second phase, which includes refining and testing electrical systems, and investigating possibilities for broader applications.

I was wondering if/when that was going to happen. It never made sense to me to power oil equipment on expensive fuels when they could use renewables to pump the stuff out. Do you use anything like that?

A wind powered oil recovery project, led by DNV GL, has completed its first phase and is currently moving into its second phase, which includes refining and testing electrical systems, and investigating possibilities for broader applications.

I was wondering if/when that was going to happen. It never made sense to me to power oil equipment on expensive fuels when they could use renewables to pump the stuff out. Do you use anything like that?

We would have heard about it by now. Very loud and clear, and I dare say . . . wordy lol So . . . no

S - "It never made sense to me to power oil equipment on expensive fuels when they could use renewables to pump the stuff out. Do you use anything like that?"

If an operator is lucky there's enough NG to power the facility. Especially if it's not enough to pipe out and would flare it anyway. Diesel is expensive especially when you include the cost of boating it out.

But typically the biggest problem is space. The cost per sq ft on a production platform is high so space is allocated judiciously. And then the same problem: intermittency. For production equipment that has to run 24/7 they would need either space for expensive batteries or diesel redundancy.

The projected noted might have one big advantage: they'll use the alt power for water injection. I'll assume it's being done for pressure maintenance/EOR. In that case going offline for a day or 5 wouldn't be that critical. OTOH if producing wells making 100,000 bopd had to be shut in for a few days management would be very upset.

pstarr - "...the bean counters do understand the underlying concept...". Actually the oil patch bean counters watching over the production side not only don't understand the concept they don't even know it exists. Furthermore they have no idea of how much energy is used to drill/complete a well. In fact they don't even know the $ cost. Likewise the payable side of accounting (the folks that write the checks for my fuel purchases) never seess the data from the production side...volume or revenue.

But there is a group that sees all the accounting from the monies and bbls spent and the revenue and bbls produced: the management. And you're welcome to maintain your horseheadness but it won't change the FACT: in 41 years I've not seen or heard one geologist, engineer, accountant or manager use the acronym " EROEI". The first time the Rockman heard of the concept was some years ago on The Oil Drum. Which again is simply because in reviewing economic analysis of probably 1,000+ drilling proposals over the last 4 decades the Rockman has not ever seen the concept applied in the decision making process. Not once.

Remember what the Rockman has said and, more important, what he hasn't said: he's never said that the EROEI concept was valid. Just that it never has and never will be used to make oil/NG development decisions. That's not being stubborn...just being factual.

Just the same as the FACT that the big decrease in oil prices has resulted in HIGHER EROEI's of wells being drilled today the when oil was $90+/bbl. Which completely invalidate the assertion of many that EROEI inevitably DECREASES over time. The math is very simple: even though costs have declined they haven't fallen as much as oil prices. So to reach the same acceptable ROR to justify drilling the same well drilled now has to produce more oil then an identical one when oil prices were high.

And that FACT is showing up in the latest stats: while not as many rigs are running now as a few years the initial production rates of new wells in most trends are higher. They have to be to develop acceptably profit levels with the lower oil prices we have today.

ROCKMAN wrote:Just the same as the FACT that the big decrease in oil prices has resulted in HIGHER EROEI's of wells being drilled today the when oil was $90+/bbl. Which completely invalidate the assertion of many that EROEI inevitably DECREASES over time. The math is very simple: even though costs have declined they haven't fallen as much as oil prices. So to reach the same acceptable ROR to justify drilling the same well drilled now has to produce more oil then an identical one when oil prices were high.

And that FACT is showing up in the latest stats: while not as many rigs are running now as a few years the initial production rates of new wells in most trends are higher. They have to be to develop acceptably profit levels with the lower oil prices we have today.

Not to intrude on your dressing down of pstarr ( well done I must say) but the increasing ERoEI of wells drilled after the price dropped is due to the remaining operators only drilling in likely sweet spots, which is quite understandable, but what happens after they have drilled all the sweet spots out?

vt - First, to answer your question: "but what happens after they have drilled all the sweet spots out?" Easy answer: you stop drilling until oil/NG prices get high enough to drill what's left.

But here's the better post: The best wind power scam I've ever seen. Saw the story on a CBS TV show Saturday morning. I doubt anyone at the network realized they were participating in fraud. Found the company's website so here are their "facts":

"Plastic Wind Trees Are Bringing Sustainable Power To Residential Homes

Things are changing now as a company believes they have the solution to residential wind turbines. A French business called New Wind has developed what they’re calling a ‘wind tree,’ built and conceived by Claudio Colucci Design, that can be placed in the backyard of consumer homes to generate energy at home. The man-made trees are made from plastic and aluminum to mimic the appearance of branches. Plastic leaves (which serve as the turbine blades) are painted green and placed vertically at the ends of each branch. As the wind blows, the ‘leaves’ spin, generating wind power that goes to a transformer to be used in the home."

"There are a total of 54 leaf turbines on the existing model. As the wind blows, it can capture as much as 5.4 kilowatts of energy at a time. If it continually captures that much energy, the wind trees can produce around 2,400 kWh of energy annually. That’s about half the amount of energy used in a typical French household in a year. Getting two of these trees in a single backyard would take care of all the home’s energy needs.".

"These turbines are also incredibly inexpensive when compared to other forms of sustainable energy like solar power. For both delivery and installation, a single wind tree costs about €49,500 (about $56,000), a fraction of the cost for installation and delivery of solar panels."

So there you go: 2,400 kWh/year for the low, low price of $59,000. Step right up!

We urgently need to stop the ecological posturing and invest in gas and nuclear

The Global Wind Energy Council recently released its latest report, excitedly boasting that ‘the proliferation of wind energy into the global power market continues at a furious pace, after it was revealed that more than 54 gigawatts of clean renewable wind power was installed across the global market last year’.

You may have got the impression from announcements like that, and from the obligatory pictures of wind turbines in any BBC story or airport advert about energy, that wind power is making a big contribution to world energy today. You would be wrong. Its contribution is still, after decades — nay centuries — of development, trivial to the point of irrelevance.

Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Even put together, wind and photovoltaic solar are supplying less than 1 per cent of global energy demand. From the International Energy Agency’s 2016 Key Renewables Trends, we can see that wind provided 0.46 per cent of global energy consumption in 2014, and solar and tide combined provided 0.35 per cent. Remember this is total energy, not just electricity, which is less than a fifth of all final energy, the rest being the solid, gaseous, and liquid fuels that do the heavy lifting for heat, transport and industry.

Such numbers are not hard to find, but they don’t figure prominently in reports on energy derived from the unreliables lobby (solar and wind). Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.

Even in rich countries playing with subsidised wind and solar, a huge slug of their renewable energy comes from wood and hydro, the reliable renewables. Meanwhile, world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years. Between 2013 and 2014, again using International Energy Agency data, it grew by just under 2,000 terawatt-hours.

If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum. That’s one-and-a-half times as many as have been built in the world since governments started pouring consumer funds into this so-called industry in the early 2000s.

At a density of, very roughly, 50 acres per megawatt, typical for wind farms, that many turbines would require a land area greater than the British Isles, including Ireland. Every year. If we kept this up for 50 years, we would have covered every square mile of a land area the size of Russia with wind farms. Remember, this would be just to fulfil the new demand for energy, not to displace the vast existing supply of energy from fossil fuels, which currently supply 80 per cent of global energy needs.

Do not take refuge in the idea that wind turbines could become more efficient. There is a limit to how much energy you can extract from a moving fluid, the Betz limit, and wind turbines are already close to it. Their effectiveness (the load factor, to use the engineering term) is determined by the wind that is available, and that varies at its own sweet will from second to second, day to day, year to year.

As machines, wind turbines are pretty good already; the problem is the wind resource itself, and we cannot change that. It’s a fluctuating stream of low–density energy. Mankind stopped using it for mission-critical transport and mechanical power long ago, for sound reasons. It’s just not very good.

As for resource consumption and environmental impacts, the direct effects of wind turbines — killing birds and bats, sinking concrete foundations deep into wild lands — is bad enough. But out of sight and out of mind is the dirty pollution generated in Inner Mongolia by the mining of rare-earth metals for the magnets in the turbines. This generates toxic and radioactive waste on an epic scale, which is why the phrase ‘clean energy’ is such a sick joke and ministers should be ashamed every time it passes their lips.

It gets worse. Wind turbines, apart from the fibreglass blades, are made mostly of steel, with concrete bases. They need about 200 times as much material per unit of capacity as a modern combined cycle gas turbine. Steel is made with coal, not just to provide the heat for smelting ore, but to supply the carbon in the alloy. Cement is also often made using coal. The machinery of ‘clean’ renewables is the output of the fossil fuel economy, and largely the coal economy.

A two-megawatt wind turbine weighs about 250 tonnes, including the tower, nacelle, rotor and blades. Globally, it takes about half a tonne of coal to make a tonne of steel. Add another 25 tonnes of coal for making the cement and you’re talking 150 tonnes of coal per turbine. Now if we are to build 350,000 wind turbines a year (or a smaller number of bigger ones), just to keep up with increasing energy demand, that will require 50 million tonnes of coal a year. That’s about half the EU’s hard coal–mining output.

Forgive me if you have heard this before, but I have a commercial interest in coal. Now it appears that the black stuff also gives me a commercial interest in ‘clean’, green wind power.

The point of running through these numbers is to demonstrate that it is utterly futile, on a priori grounds, even to think that wind power can make any significant contribution to world energy supply, let alone to emissions reductions, without ruining the planet. As the late David MacKay pointed out years back, the arithmetic is against such unreliable renewables.

The truth is, if you want to power civilisation with fewer greenhouse gas emissions, then you should focus on shifting power generation, heat and transport to natural gas, the economically recoverable reserves of which — thanks to horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — are much more abundant than we dreamed they ever could be. It is also the lowest-emitting of the fossil fuels, so the emissions intensity of our wealth creation can actually fall while our wealth continues to increase. Good.

And let’s put some of that burgeoning wealth in nuclear, fission and fusion, so that it can take over from gas in the second half of this century. That is an engineerable, clean future. Everything else is a political displacement activity, one that is actually counterproductive as a climate policy and, worst of all, shamefully robs the poor to make the rich even richer.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

Good article Tanada. But it fails in the final instance. If you want to power civilization then civilization needs to power down. Reduce our per capita energy use drastically. Reducing our population also. We could have a vibrant sustainable civilization, within limits. But you know that.

Newfie wrote:Good article Tanada. But it fails in the final instance. If you want to power civilization then civilization needs to power down. Reduce our per capita energy use drastically. Reducing our population also. We could have a vibrant sustainable civilization, within limits. But you know that.

On the contrary, if you want to eliminate human suffering and drop the world birthrate to sustainable levels the path is pretty clear to me. It might be power down a bit for people in North America or Europe, but it is a significant power up for Africa, South America and Asia. Americans in the 1950's hit an energy consumption level that started cutting significantly into the birth rate, and statistically speaking as countries around the world hit that same level birthrates have fallen to replacement rate or lower. China is now profligate energy using but small family style life. India is still growing but they are also now transitioning to high energy lifestyle.

I should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write, balance accounts, build a wall, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.